Schools are “failing our children”. So say various government watchdogs, quangos, hypocrites, rhinoceroses and jabberwockies. But aforementioned bodies (some of which I may have made up a little bit) don’t take into account that it’s their fault in the first place that schools are “failing our children”. Not to mention the fact that there’s also a lot of blame to lay at the feet of both the parents and the kids themselves before you start pointing the Finger of Justice™ at the hard-working teachers and other school staff who are trying very much to make the best of a bad lot.

I quit being a full-time teacher. Twice, in fact. I’m not going to make that mistake a third time. Fool me once and all that. Currently, to pay the bills, I am enjoying the life of a supply teacher. This means that I can choose whether or not to sleep in every morning or maybe be woken at the crack of dawn by a phone call saying some festering scumhole school in the very armpit of Southampton is short of a teacher for today and could I possibly go along with a chair, a whip and a net and see if I can do anything with them? There are two very simple equations to bear in mind here.

1. sb = 0(£) + 100(j) where sb is “staying in bed”, £ is money and j is joy.

2. nsbapcdtvfssvas = muchos(£) – 5000(j) where nsbapcdtvfssvas is “not staying in bed, answering phone at crack of dawn, visiting festering scumhole school in very armpit of Southampton”, £ is money and j is joy.

So while equation 1 leads to a gain in joy, it does not lead to a gain in money. Indirectly, in fact, it tends to lead to a decrease in money, as staying at home often leads to wandering out in search of coffee. However, while equation 2 leads to an increase in money it leads to a substantial hit in the joy department. And no, that’s not a euphemism for your dangly parts.

But I digress in talk of made-up maths. I was about to tell you what is so very wrong with education. Particularly primary-level education, as that’s where I’ve been spending most of my time recently. So let’s do another list, shall we? Good. I know how you like lists, particularly if they’re illustrated.

1. Overcomplicating everything.

I remember when I was at primary school. A tick meant “correct” and a cross meant “wrong”. If you were lucky, you got a brief comment, like “Good.” or “Lazy work.” depending on whether you’d done good or lazy work.

In the school I was working in today, they had a “marking key” on the wall. A squiggly line meant “look at this”. A straight line with a “sp” meant “spelling mistake”. A circled letter meant “you should have used a capital letter”. A circled empty space meant “you have missed some punctuation”. A caret meant “you’ve missed a word out”. And then and only then did the key reveal that, yes, tick means “correct” and cross (or dot, now) means “wrong”.

Seriously? These are eight- and nine-year olds we’re dealing with here. Some of them can barely read, and you expect them to decipher that babble? Not only that, but then every book is expected to have a comment in there which, at the very least, says something inane like “Well done! You have shown me you are able to use connectives to join sentences together!” or “Congratulations! You successfully subtracted two things using the written method!” or “Super! You were able to recreate the entire Nutcracker Suite through the medium of rectal flatulence!”

Which brings us nicely on to…

2. Using unnecessarily high-level language.

Remember: eight- and nine-year olds. Do they really need to know terminology like “learning objective” and “success criteria”? I am yet to meet a child who actually knows why they write down the learning objective and success criteria other than “it’s the stuff we copy at the start of the work, innit”. The sole purpose for it is so when the inspectors come to play that the teachers can point proudly at the various learning objectives and say “Look! They’ve done this!”.

Bollocks.

3. Making unnecessary work.

Oh silly me. I made a mistake. The children shouldn’t be copying the learning objective and success criteria. The teacher should have prepared them all in advance, trimmed them to size and stuck them in the children’s books for them. Bear in mind at this point that a typical class has about 30 kids in it, each with at least five books (literacy, numeracy, “topic”, science, art) and each day typically has four or five different things going on throughout the course of it. So hey, with all that to plan, what’s a little extra cutting and sticking into ninety different books?

4. Dumb-ass theories that make no sense.

There are too many of these to count. Phonics is one. Anything involving behaviour management is another. Take a quick detour and go and watch this, including the stupid interactive part. The first shot of the class and the obnoxious children in it is the most accurate depiction of what it’s actually like to be in a classroom. However, the supposed “strategies” for dealing with the class are complete bollocks. Giving the teen who thinks talking about fucking his classmate’s mother a “positive note” if he sits down and gets on with his work? Don’t make me laugh.

5. Pressure, pressure, pressure!

I was talking to someone the other day – I think it may have been Rhiarti – and talking about how the imagination of young people is stifled these days. UPDATE: Yes, it was definitely Rhiarti, right here, in fact. So yes – the imagination of young people is stifled by the fact that they’re expected to learn all these million-and-one different techniques which there’s no way in hell are going to stay in their tiny heads. I remember “writing” at primary school being all about writing stories. Now, they’re expected to write Reports, Explanation Texts, Instruction Texts, Recounts, Narratives and all manner of other things (all inevitably capitalised, too) rather than, you know, just being able to sit down and write to express themselves. Even when they do get the rare opportunity to write a story, it’s inevitably got such a long list of completely arbitrary success criteria for them to fulfil that any semblance of creativity has been battered out of them by the end of their school career. Which is sad.

All this is the tip of the iceberg. Don’t even get me started on the “three stage lesson”, on “thinking skills”, “thinking hats”, Bloom’s Taxonomy, starters, plenaries and all manner of other shit.

So, in summary, a lot needs to change. But unfortunately, all of the things above, which are quite obviously and clearly dumb and stupid, are the sorts of things which men in suits with clipboards think “get results” and “show progress”. Well hooray for progress. Somehow we managed without it for a long time. Why can’t we go back to those days, for the kids’ sake and for the sake of the poor, anxious teachers constantly on the verge of nervous breakdowns?